Thoughts on The 100 (seasons 1-4)

This random collection of musings must carry the standard Spoiler alert. This is not a review, and my thoughts are not structured or coherent, but more like I’m sitting across the table from you with a margarita just rambling about the show.

Clarke is definitely the hero of the show until the end of season 2. After that, it changes. All of her actions up to that point are inarguably noble (unless I’m forgetting something), but even if you think pulling the radiation switch and killing the residents of Mt. Weather to save her people was the right thing to do, you can’t really call it nobility. You can’t call it the act of a hero. (Just like I refuse to call Harry Truman a hero for nuking the Japanese in WWII.) After this, you don’t really root for her anymore. You may want her to be okay and to make the right decisions, but she is now morally compromised in the same way that Jaha and Kane were from their stints as “gods” of the Ark. Yes, I say “gods” because one of the Big Themes of this show is “who has the right to decide who gets to live and die?” On a personal level, it’s an affront to me as someone who doesn’t even believe in the death penalty. “What is the cost of survival?” is another way to phrase it. And there are so many ways you could explore that. Are the writers talking about nationalism and “America First” versus globalism as immigrants fight to enter our country for a better life, or even survival?  If so, one wonders—based on the decisions made by the show’s “heroes”—what the producer’s stance on these issues would be if they take an honest look at their political beliefs next to the values they espouse in their program. And yes, to be clear, I do believe that writers have an agenda. These show-runners are not neutral. Entertainment is more than just that (well, not all, but any real genuine storytelling with compelling characters and themes); it is messaging. But the messaging in this show is muddled…and not in the good way that reflects life’s complexities, but rather, in a way that reveals inconsistencies in writing, in characterization, in “what exactly am I supposed to be taking away from this?”

Bellamy changes a lot in the show. So does Murphy. But in both cases, it’s inconsistent. Hero or monster? Yes, people are complex, and they are both good and evil, but here, I think the writers just can’t decide. Jaha is a mess of confused characterization. What I’m not clear on is when did Jaha first get under the influence of A.L.I.E.? Because his behavior leading up to the discovery of the “City of Light” was pretty freaky and cult-like. I mean, when he threw two of the boys off the boat to be eaten by that sea creature? One minute he’s noble, and the next minute, he’s pure evil. He uses real wisdom to give the Arkadians motivation to repair the ark by suggesting a lottery, then later—in a move that is completely counter-intuitive to Clarke’s character development—conspires with Clarke to keep all grounders out of the bunker. It makes no sense. And Luna…what a wasted opportunity that was. She was a fascinating character, very different from anyone else in any clan, a peace-lover, converted from savagery. But for the sake of a banal plot point (the Hunger Games style death-match at the end of season 4), they throw it all away. She’s given up on her humanity, and on everyone else’s too. But wait, that sounds familiar. It sounds kind of like someone else we know. Oh yeah! It sounds like Jasper.

Jasper was like the soldier who never enlisted, the kid who got drafted to the Vietnam or some other pre-all-volunteer-military war but who never had any business on a battlefield because he didn’t have the right psychological make-up. His coping mechanisms were his humor and innocence, neither of which could survive the harsh realities on the ground. Besides being an actual kid, he was a kid at heart and probably always would have been had he not seen the tragedy that he did. His humor was an essential contrast to the always-weighty and somewhat overwrought drama. Since he was my favorite on the show, I try to look for a Purpose for the writers giving him the fate they did. I knew very early on from looking at YouTube videos that he eventually died, and season 4 was torture because you could see it happen in slow motion. He started dying after Mt. Weather. You could say he started in the first episode after being attacked by grounders, but I don’t think so. He died of a broken heart. The actor who played him talked about PTSD and going to some “dark places” to find the role. So I get that depression exists, and it would certainly exist in a post-apocalyptic world of kill-or-be-killed survivalism. Jasper liked having A.L.I.E. as it took away his psychological pain just as it took away Raven’s physical pain. A.L.I.E. was a drug just like alcohol and those weird berries he eventually overdosed on. So from a storytelling standpoint, there’s nothing nonsensical about Jasper’s journey and where it took him. I just wish it hadn’t ended the way it did because hope is as important as survival (in fact, it’s a necessary ingredient) and to show someone recovering from these wounds instead of succumbing would have been just as strong of a message, and the show would not be without one of its most interesting characters. What disappoints me most as a fan of the character is that, in his process of giving up on life, he encouraged others to do the same, like some Jim Jones-esque cult leader, telling his follows to drink the Kool-Aid. We already had Jaha for that. And that’s a lousy thing for show-runners to do to a beloved character and his fans.

A lot of people like Octavia. The interesting thing about her is that she is basically clay. She spent so much time under the floor that when she was finally among other human beings, she was the most impressionable person there. The first guy she ever liked was a potter who molded her into the perfect Trikru warrior. You could argue that she became strong-minded and heroic with the influence of Indra (one of my favorite grounders), but she is still a product of that foreign influence, as strange as the indoctrination of the A.L.I.E. cult. And what can you say of this “love affair” with Lincoln? So many of her actions are based on her devotion to him, but the writers of the series never really bothered to show their so-called “relationship” very much. Don’t believe me? Go back and watch for yourself. There’s really almost nothing there. There are very few scenes with Octavia and Lincoln. What was the basis of this great “love”? If you’re going to have something like that be so influential on a character, you need to show us a little more to make it believable. I was actually more moved by the brief time Octavia spent with Ilian than with Lincoln. And that, by the way, was another good character thrown away in the series’ obsession with excessive violence. (And seriously, why does there have to be so much bloodshed on this show? At some point, you just get numb to it.)

Don’t get me started on Monty killing his mother. That did not have to happen. And honestly, I don’t think he would have recovered. Ever. I know I’m not the writer, I didn’t create the character, but seriously, that’s messed up.

Then there was the ever-so-slight gay story of Miller and Bryan, the latter of which was played by one of my favorite twink actors. This series spent all of its gay currency on Clarke’s lesbian relationships, which is annoying to me as a gay viewer. Not really much more to say about that. Except that I’m glad not to have had to see Kane and Jaha lift Bryan’s drugged, sleeping body from the bunker to suffer Praimfaya because he didn’t qualify for Clarke’s social Darwinesque eugenics-approved List.

But on the other hand, this is one of the weaknesses of the show. The series pays lip service to moral complexity and guilt, but refuses to implicate its audience in its own bloodlust. We don’t see the children of Mt. Weather getting killed by radiation. We just know it happened. We don’t see Lexa’s intended predecessor Aden’s severed head, so Clarke has to say his name to make sure we know he was murdered. We don’t see the faces of the 100 who are carried out to their fiery deaths at the end of season 4, particularly if they were characters that we knew and cared about. To do this might make viewers weary of the show’s violence, and ratings could suffer. Better not to have to think too much on these things. It’s lip service, a perfunctory temporary guilt trip, and then move on.

All in all, I think the character that I respect the most is Raven. She’s the one I’d most want beside me, and who I’d be most likely to want to support.

Other character notes: Pike was horrible, but I did admire the flashback episode that showed him on the Ark in space, assigned the thankless task of preparing the 100 for their journey to the ground. You get to see that he’s not all bad, that he really cares for his people…before Octavia stabs him through the heart, an act of senseless vengeance that is only challenged briefly by Kane. Raymond Berry played the president of Mt. Weather. He is a wonderful, seasoned actor who I always love to see whenever he shows up in something. I was really sorry to see him shot by Clarke. Finn was another character who changed rather quickly and inexplicably. Again, trauma does weird things to people, but when he unleashed the machine gun on that village, I just didn’t really believe it. It didn’t track for me. It was a means to an end for the story plotters. Jasper’s Mt. Weather girlfriend was another example of a relationship that was supposed to mean a lot, but that we don’t see enough of to really make it real. So the whole weight of that had to be carried by Devon Bostick who no-doubt had to make up scenes between Jasper and his love to justify his tremendous grief.

From most of what I’ve written, it probably sounds like I dislike the show, but if that were the case, I certainly would not have watched it for this long. And I’ll watch it, probably, until it ends. But if I like a show, that makes it all the more frustrating when writers and producers do dumb things. “I could have made this better”, you think.

Final note: Kane likes to say, “We’ll find our humanity again.” It will be interesting to see, by the show’s end, if that really happens and to what extent.